Sorcerer Guide
Post-Nerf

Since we've been nerfed very drastically in the recent past, the number of viable Sorcerer builds has dropped to a very small amount. I'll detail the main 2 possibilities now for Sorcerers, and how one might want to allocate the remaining skills.

Between INT and AGI, INT is your friend at lower levels, and AGI is your friend at higher levels.

Skip the following section if you can't understand mid-level mathematics.

INT increases Magical Power. AGI increases critical rate.

5% increased crit chance is something that returns its usefulness at all levels. INT, however, is something with diminishing returns.

Hypothetically, with a 0-5% crit rate increase, we're dealing with from 0 to 100 crits out of 2000 attacks.

Whereas with a 20-25% crit rate increaes, we're dealing with from 400 to 500 crits out of 2000 attacks. The damage increase is constant, as a % of your total damage.

In contrast, with an increase of, say, 50 INT, 1-51 INT is a difference of 100 Magical Power, which in the case of a non-crit Frost Driven Jupiter Thunder, is 256 damage.

If your gear is at 0 and you have no +Magical attack from a weapon, (for argument's sake, this isn't gonna be true unless you remove everything), the damage you'll do is 2 MP * 256% = 5.12 damage at 1 INT, or 102 MP * 256% = 261 damage at 51 int. That's a whopping 51 times more damage.

If your gear is at... +400 INT, 802 MP * 256% = 2053 damage if you had 1 INT base stat. Whereas if you had 51 INT, that would be 902 MP * 256% = 2309 damage if you had 51 INT base stat. That's a difference of only 12.5% damage.

verxified, on 25 January 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

Just to add: it's 0.0916% crit per agi pt at level 50

If that is true, then the following applies:

Damage improvement per point of Int must beat the points of Agi in order for Int to be worth raising.

The point of equivalence is where each int point raises magic power by more than 0.0916%.

This means x+2/x > 1.000916

Therefore x+2 > 1.000916x
Therefore 0.000916x < 2
Therefore x < 2183.4 ~ 2184. Int is better than Agi if they take the same amount of stat points to raise, and your magic power is less than 2184.

If your magic power is greater than 2184, Agi is better.

So if your Magic Power is, say, 2200, it would be best to have essentially a 1:1 Agi:Int build, and use Agi pots/cards/buffs.
Since INT is far more powerful at low levels, pump INT at low levels up to the point of equivalence, then pump AGI until they are equal in terms of how much you spent to get that last point. This might be at 41/41/0/0/0, from what I heard.

Your secondary job should be an Alchemist. You will need a lot of a blue potions, and the +30s boost and +30min buff potions will also serve you well. Blacksmiths and Artisans are underpowered at the moment since all the blue+ equips are boss drops, making the main point of their profession essentially pointless. They've been known to complain about being glorified holepunchers/runecrafters.

Skills to NEVER take beyond level 1:

1. Water Arms. Because of the nerf, the main use of Water Arms (as a way to increase survivability on healers, as a dead healer isn't a healer at all) is now destroyed. Leave this at 1 only if you need later skills.
2. Soul Cleansing. If it's a status that needs to be removed from the whole party like paralysis, you can't remove it since you're also paralysed yourself. If it's a single target debuff, which will almost always hit your tank (and occasionally the priest), level 1 works.
3. Soul Binding. Even maxed, it takes 30 minutes to recast it. That's too long to be useful in any fight more than level 1 already is.
4. The entire Fire tree. At best, it's useless relative to your Lightning tree skills. At worst, if you take Level 1 Fire Ball, your Level 1 may overwrite a Wizard's Fire Ball, which actually reduces party damage.

Skills you MUST take to level 5:

1. Earth Shield, because it buffs your entire party and improves all of their survivability.
2. Land of Recovery, because it is the strongest Sorcerer heal, and if you just want to do DPS without ANY heals at all, you should probably play a Ranger instead. Not that the build wouldn't work at all, but you'd be forcing the class to do something it wasn't designed for. Like shaving using a kitchen cleaver.
3. Either Wind or Earth Arms.

Other possible builds include taking two Arms spells at level 5 (Wind and Earth), and using Wind for everything except bosses, Earth for bosses only. It's possible, but will gimp you in both DPS and Healing roles somewhat. You could do that, but you'd probably be less useful to most parties than the Full Support build. You might still be more in demand than the full DPS build however, because of how few classes can heal, and how important healing is at later stages.

I STILL don't recommend using two Arms at the moment. But since it seems that people do like to hybrid quite a bit, this would be my double-Arms recommendation:

Your Deluge will be weaker than an FS Sorc as payment for wanting to use 2 Arms. You have one point to allocate. If you want to do more Support, add to Deluge. If you want to go more down the DPS route, add to Varetyr Spear. If you can't decide, add to Meditation.

You will have the hardest time of any Sorc since you may have to switch Arms often. If using only one at a time but different Arms against different enemies, then you'd use Wind against the weak ones and Earth against the strong ones.

If you're going to dare to use both in the same fight against a boss, then use Earth Arms pre-emptively whenever the boss summons, and drop LoR before using your Frost Driver->Varetyr Spear->Jupiter Thunder combination on a summon. Switch to Wind Arms after all summons are dead. Use Earth Arms pre-emptively near the end of the fight when it enters Enrage status, the amount of extra damage you can do with Wind Arms' benefits (+10% to total party damage or less, probably) will not justify the loss of 25% of the party's healing output.

Acknowledgements:

1. verxified for information on Critical Rate per point AGI at lvl 50.
2. Altariel for challenging the initial recommendations enough to motivate me to do that Meditation test. I understand Meditation far more than I did at the outset now.

Other Replies To This Topic

Cookie-cutter Cold Bolt/Jupiter Thunder/Wind Arms/Land of Recovery. Refer to yourself as a DPS Sorc when advertising yourself to make everyone's life easier.

Do not forget that at 50% effectiveness, most of your heals are going to be crap. You are a DPS with LoR. Don't bother getting Healing Wave since if you're spamming it, you're hurting your party by doing crap DPS - and also doing crap healing without Earth Arms. And in cases when damage is dealt the fastest to your party, it's usually during the times that bosses summon minions. In those times, you need burst damage to kill them fast far more than you need an ineffective heal spammed on your tank. If you have to choose, kill the summon, let one of your members die and resurrect them immediately, if it will save the whole party from being wiped otherwise. Unfortunately this build cannot keep everyone alive anymore without the assistance of a very skilled priest. Remember also that since you're nerfed to 11% heal, you absolutely MUST keep LoR up at all times, at the correct location. This is basically going to be the main reason to keep you around instead of kicking you off and getting a ranger instead.

This is the main skeleton of the build. All skills up to this point are compulsory to have a non-gimped build.

From here, you have 5 points left to allocate freely. Your main rotation is going to be Cold Bolt with Wind Arms and Earth Shield active, until either Wind Arms or JT Mastery procs. In the event of JT Mastery Proc you use Frost Driver followed by Jupiter Thunder and Varetyr Spear, and a few Lightning Bolts, on a summon - or only a single Jupiter Thunder on the boss if there is no summon. In the event of Wind Arms proc you use Varetyr Spear immediately on the boss followed by a Jupiter Thunder, or 2 Jupiter Thunders if VS is on cooldown. Cold Bolt will be your main attack against occasional summons and random mobs unless you have Varetyr Spear ready to cast, in which case you use Frost Driver and it as soon as you can. Lightning bolt is to be spammed at after Varetyr Spear against enemies while are frozen by Frost Driver. Never refreeze an enemy that still has the 50% freeze time buff on it unless you already have a JT Mastery proc or Varetyr Spear, for as a DPS sorc you'll do more damage using Cold Bolt instead of 3 measly Lightning Bolts.

Main recommendations in descending order of recommendation(You can't use all of them at the same time, there's not enough points. Take your pick.):

1. Maxed Meditation. Meditation adds 40% of your hit rate above 95% to your critical damage multiplier per point above 1 - and it works on both heals and damage spells, from testing. In ideal circumstances, this is +2% critical damage per point (100% hit rate). With endgame gear and good buffs you might expect a crit rate of about 25%. Thus your actual damage gain per point of meditation to all spells is +0.5%. Cold Bolt does about 40% MP per second on average (due to animation delay). But if you take into account JT Mastery and Wind Arms procs, together with usage of Varetyr Spear, it could well be double that. This will probably add more damage per point than Summon Aqua, and unlike it is useful at all times, whereas Aqua sometimes doesn't quite fire as it should.

2. Maxed Summon Aqua to add damage every 120 seconds against bosses. Against normal mobs, this may be a problem as Aqua tends to attack the closest enemy to it - which may very well be a nonaggressive white mob, while you're already fighting red mobs. Against bosses, this is useful. Very useful. We're talking about a 4.75% MP damage per second added by Summon Aqua when it's maxed, or 3.25% MP damage per second added at level 1 - or, 0.375% damage per second per point.

3. Maxed Deluge, to be used to make the healer's job easier if everyone gets hit by an AoE. But never forget that your main job in a party is to deal damage, not to heal - because your heals are 50% as effective as they were before the nerf. This is kind of a special case due to how powerful Deluge is even after nerfed to 50%. But it wouldn't be as important as the above as Deluge at lvl 1 already has great utility.

4. Maxed Lightning bolt, to increase your burst damage. This would be good for PvP and to KO boss summons faster, but generally speaking you'll be casting Cold Bolt so much more often that this doesn't really seem very good at the moment. Not to mention its SP cost increases by 1 per skill point, and it could get SP-expensive when maxed.

5. Maxed Foresight to add additional reliable damage every 120 seconds by using the combination JT->LBx2->JT->LBx2->JT before returning to your usual cycle. But given how lousy Lightning Bolt is, this might not be very useful at all to increase. Normally the rotation is FD->Foresight->JT->LBx2->JT->FD->JT->VS from 20 metres away, as the hits on Foresight are counted only when the spells casted under it actually hit the target, and since JT has a travel time, you can use this to essentially cast 4 spells with Foresight. But it's not very useful on bosses themselves unless you have a Wind Arms proc, since they're unfreezable. Given this, the rotation works well enough even at lvl 1 Foresight that adding points may not be very useful.

6. One more point of JT Mastery. Contrary to the kRO2 skills as in the link, JT Mastery in RO2.SEA is 7-13-15%. Therefore, adding one more point increases your proc rate by only 2% over the previous point. So it's not really very efficient - but then, this will be your main skill rotation anyway, so do consider it as an option.

7. Lord of Vermillion if you're expecting to need to use a lot of AoE. This is not going to be very useful in most situations though, since it may be better to kill summons off one by one so that they don't contribute too much damage against your party. AoE nonstop will lead to enemies being weakened but not dead, and still doing full damage. In the worst-case scenario, you draw aggro from all of them, and you die in short order because your heals are basically weak. Lastly, Lord of Vermillion roots you in place, making you unable to respond quickly to certain battle changes. This skill may very well kill you if you're not careful.

Your roles in a party, in order of importance are:

1. Cast an unbroken chain of Land of Recovery on the tank.
2. Eliminate boss summoned minions as fast as possible.
3. Deal high damage to the boss itself.

2 and 3 may swap positions depending on the nature of the boss, and its HP level. If it's on its last legs don't care about attacking minions. And some boss summons have so much HP it's ridiculous to think about killing them (think Vador).

Deluge/Land of Recovery/Healing Wave/Frost Driver/Varetyr Spear/Lightning Bolt/Earth Arms. Refer to yourself as a FS (Full Support) Sorcerer when advertising yourself. There's probably no better way to allocate healing points without sacrificing burst damage so much that you make yourself an inferior version of a FS Priest.

You're using Earth Arms. Nonstop. You cannot use Wind Seal. Forget about it. What benefits the most from Wind Seal? The Cold Bolt->Jupiter Thunder combination. Therefore, forget about it. Your damage should be geared towards maximum damage in the least amount of time before switching back to your primary role as a AoE healer. To kill adds, you use Varetyr Spear and Lvl 1 Lightning Bolt together with Frost Driver.

The skills that do the most damage in the least time are Summon Aqua and Varetyr Spear, but between the two Varetyr Spear does higher burst damage, and both are already somewhat viable at even level 1. Healing Wave should be maxed - and forget about Rejuvenation for the most part, since it's not spammable. Use it to end off healing chains before the next Land of Recovery, or in emergency situations only. Use Foresight to spam LoR-Healing Wave-Healing Wave when your tank is in trouble. You can't afford points to reduce its cooldown, so don't use it loosely. When your whole party is hit by a strong enough AoE spell, use Deluge quickly, before spamming heals on the lowest HP member (not the lowest HP fraction, the lowest HP as a number). Generally, you shouldn't need to use Deluge unless during A: the boss summoning phase or B: the final enrage phase at the last 10% HP. This tends to mean you get to use it exactly twice per fight. Fire Summon Aqua during the boss summons/critical phase to add damage when it counts the most, and use Frost Driver->Varetyr Spear->5x Lightning Bolt immediately after casting a Land of Recovery if the boss summons - you should have enough time to then use 2 more Healing Waves before you can use a Land of Recovery again. In the weird situation where your party is at full health and you have nothing better to do, use Cold Bolt on the boss for the chance of a JT Mastery proc. When you do get one, use it immediately if the boss is not liable to summon soon; use it on summons together with VS if they're already there.

When hunting normal mobs, use the FD->VS->5x LB->FD->3x LB->Cold Bolt nonstop until Strong Will II wears off. It works pretty well. It's now 30-40% weaker than what I was using earlier before the nerf because LB is now Lvl 1 and I can't use a JT-Foresight combi any more, but you can't have everything. And FS Priests have to hunt using Lvl 1 Holy Light, so they have far more reason to complain than we do about soloing problems.

Maxing Meditation raises your overall healing power at very high levels when you have +Hit gear. If healing is your priority max this, or put this as high as you can afford.
Getting one extra point in JT Mastery would increase your spike damage by allowing you to use JT twice as often as usual, which may help against bosses quite a bit.
Maxing Summon Aqua will improve your damage against bosses but may be little to no improvement for normal training. If you must get this, it would be better to spend one point in JT Mastery first and pump the remaining 3 into here.
Maxing Lightning Bolt will improve your damage in normal training and against boss summons, but this probably won't be as useful in bosses as Summon Aqua, JT Mastery or Meditation would.
Maxing Rejuvenation would improve your spike healing on the tank/priest/yourself in bad situations, but generally speaking it's going to be an inferior choice to maxing Meditation. See later posts for details.
Maxing Foresight would allow you to do emergency heals on the tank twice in a single boss fight. But generally speaking, that's really the Priest's job, so I wouldn't recommend it.

This is my actual final build after considering quite a few things. And after getting corrected a few times since the inception of this guide.

P.S. As a primary/solo healer (more likely at lower levels) focus Healing Wave on the tank. Learn the F-key shortcuts for targeting party members, clicking will be too slow. Everyone else gets healing from LoR only. If everyone is in a bad state, Deluge.

As a secondary healer (almost definitely going to be the case at higher levels) focus Healing Wave on everybody but the tank, ESPECIALLY the priest and yourself, as your health bar is the hardest to see when you're a healer. Drop LoR on the tank consistently, and make sure your party knows how to use the green area properly. The job of healing the tank with single-heal spells is the priest's job, not yours. Their single target heals are better. Also, they have a super-powerful skill that restores all HP to one party member they can use on the tank. Your powerhouses are Deluge and Land of Recovery. Your first job is to make sure you never need to use Deluge - and your second to be not afraid to use it should you fail at your first job. Don't fall into the trap of healing the tank so much that your party's average health drops low enough for a boss AoE to wipe out 2-3 members at the same time, or else people will die and people will blame both you and the priest. Even though it's not really the priest's fault.

Lastly, you have Soul Cleaning. As a support Sorc, don't forget about it, even though it's only level 1. Using it once takes priority over a single use of Healing Wave on certain statuses - that is, any DoT on the tank (poison, fire etc), paralysis esp. on the priest (if you're not paralysed yourself), knockdown esp. on the priest, as it only takes 1 second to cast. Your job is going to be far busier than a FS Priest's will be, because their single target heals are stronger than yours - and it's better for you to skip one heal to remove a debuff than for them to skip one heal. Keep your eyes open. But LoR and Deluge have highest priority at all times.

Your roles in a party, in order of importance are:

1. To save the party from being wiped with Deluge.
2. To cast an unbroken chain of Land of Recovery on the tank.
3. To use single target heals on everyone except the tank unless the tank is at critical health, or your Priest is horrendously under-geared.
4. To eliminate boss summons.

Other possible builds include taking two Arms spells at level 5 (Wind and Earth), and using Wind for everything except bosses, Earth for bosses only. It's possible, but will gimp you in both DPS and Healing roles. You could do that, but you'd probably be less useful to most parties than the builds in the below two posts.

FD is compulsory for PvP. But PvP isn't necessarily something all players want to do, so I wouldn't consider it a compulsory skill overall.

For the DPS build with weak heals, what should be my skill priority (I'm only level 26). Should I just grab all the dps skills first (maxed cold bolt + FD + and grab all the lightning spellls)?

Max Land of Recovery first, then go for the main DPS skills (JT, JT Mastery). You should already have Cold Bolt and Wind Arms maxed, and have extra skill points saved up to blow the moment you get level 25. Leave Varetyr, Earth Shield and Foresight for later.

I have no idea whether we'll still be welcomed in parties or not. At least, the FS sorc will still be very much needed for parties. But players have been known to do stupid things at times. Like attempt dungeons their level with 4 DPS, one tank and hope to survive without a healer of any sort.

I always play with my full support priest friend in dungeons, do you think the DPS build would cut it for healing? Or would I need to go the support build to help him out on heals? (We're still only around 26 at this point).

I always play with my full support priest friend in dungeons, do you think the DPS build would cut it for healing? Or would I need to go the support build to help him out on heals? (We're still only around 26 at this point).

Thanks in advance!

I solo healed up to Temple of Sea God, and I've contributed 50% of EXP to my guild since about level 18, so if anything I'm underlevelled. I also soloed Wolf Cave at level 25 to beat every boss alone except Red Fang. My build was a hybrid, it wasn't even FS. But that was before the nerf. Now at higher levels, the difference is very much bigger. My party can get wiped by Caterpillar @ the Deadly Poison Cave even with an FS priest on board - BEFORE the nerf... though maybe the noobiness of the tank might have had something to do with that. So it really depends on your party, and in this case, on your healer friend. If your healer friend is very, very good at what he does, it may well be enough. If he's substandard, you may need a FS build for your party to live at higher levels. Player skills play a major role in how the game pans out in dungeons, and it is most heavily affected by the skill of the healers followed shortly after by the skill of the tank. But don't use low level dungeons to gauge how survivable the combination is.

Tell you what. Try Vador at the minimum level that both of you can try for the Khara achievement with a random party. If your party gets wiped, you need an FS build. If your party survives, full DPS will probably make it. Because Vador (and Scoler later) are massively overpowered for their level.

Tahiku, on 25 January 2013 - 01:40 PM, said:

4% diff betwen LoR lv1 and max lv5, they should make it 3lv only to get max..
4% healing diff is that worth it?

To me it is, because it's actually 20% magic power (5 ticks over 10 seconds after one cast). It's also 50% stronger than the level 1. There's still no better heal spell for a Sorc to place the points in. But if you really want to drop the points elsewhere, it's your character, at the end of the day.

I've respecced my broken Sorc (thanks to nerf) to the FS build. It's pretty good. Varetyr Spear doing up to 4000 damage on crit at level 47 with level 43 gear is pretty darn impressive, and gives it the ability to knock out half the health of basically any summon. I haven't had to use Deluge much yet when partying with a priest but it's nice to know the option is there.

Waiting for level 50 before I decide on whether or not Meditation is a good idea.

The use of maxed Jupiter Thunder without the use of both maxed Wind Arms and maxed Cold Bolt is, generally speaking, gimping yourself to the point of making a failed character. If you intend to do max JT the other two should also be maxed and JT mastery must be at least level 2. Otherwise, the other route is Lvl 3 FD + Maxed Lightning Bolt & Varetyr Spear. Not having Varetyr Spear at all in your arsenal will lose you PvP matches, but if you're not concerned with PvP you wouldn't need to think about that.

If you MUST switch Arms, this is your base skeleton. You only have one skill point of freedom, but in wanting two Arms, it's not like you would have much points anyway.

The skill that retains most of its utility between Wind Arms mob mode and Earth Arms boss mode is Varetyr Spear, so I'd put it there. Your mileage may vary.

You are warned that using this will also make you good at neither role. You'd be out-DPSed by most DPS Sorcs. You'll be out-healed AND out-bursted by FS sorcs during bosses. The demand for you will likely be in between that of a DPS Sorc and a FS Sorc (people generally prefer FS Sorcs at high levels, since slightly less damage = slower raid, but dead person = dead person).

Just to confirm because I'd rather not assume things: you were level 47 as of yesterday so have you actually done any RHMs and raids on prior characters to lend credibility to your opinions? Because building your character up for these end game content is really what matters and I see flaws especially in your supposed healing build.

And:

Altariel, on 25 January 2013 - 03:06 PM, said:

Meditation multiplies whatever excess hit rate you have past 95% by the value stated, and adds that in heal value to your critical heals. So level 5 Meditation with a hit rate of 98% would add 115% to whichever heals rolled a crit, instead of the standard 100%.

Max Meditation works well with a full AGI build, which is what I'm running. Spamming Healing Wave and getting lots of high crits is pretty nice.

Just to confirm because I'd rather not assume things: you were level 47 as of yesterday so have you actually done any RHMs and raids on prior characters to lend credibility to your opinions? Because building your character up for these end game content is really what matters and I see flaws especially in your supposed healing build.

And:

Meditation does not affect heal critical rate.

So does the mechanism of Meditation differ from kRO2 to RO2.SEA? AFAIK Meditation upped critical rate. I'll do some tests later.

And yup, not yet. The most extreme test I've gone through so far is actually Scoler, since all dungeons up to the Assassin's Hideout are ridiculously easy, even undergeared. We'll see if things need to be updated after doing the endgame raids. The main support of the argument is through mathematics.

So does the mechanism of Meditation differ from kRO2 to RO2.SEA? AFAIK Meditation upped critical rate. I'll do some tests later.

And yup, not yet. The most extreme test I've gone through so far is actually Scoler, since all dungeons up to the Assassin's Hideout are ridiculously easy, even undergeared. We'll see if things need to be updated after doing the endgame raids. The main support of the argument is through mathematics.

I'm pretty sure Meditation for both Priest and Sorcerers added to critical value not critical rate even in kRO2.

And I applaud your theoretical arguments for now. You will definitely be able to improve your guide after gaining a practical viewpoint of end game content.